Page 37

Malek hauls the carcass forward, muscles bunching as blood slaps wet against the dirt and spatters his boots. He doesn’t hurry. Doesn’t brace. He stands under the weight like gravity learned its manners around him—unyielding, unbothered, already calibrated for worse.

Something in me shifts.

I’m tired of flinching. Tired of bracing for impact like it’s the only way to survive. If the world is going to keep swinging, then maybe it’s time I learned how to stand inside it instead of ducking.

Gravel crunches as I move. The sound feels loud in my ears, each step deliberate, chosen. I stop close enough that I can feel the heat rolling off him, smell iron and earth and effort.

“Malek.”

His head turns. Jaw tight. Breath rough, pulled straight from the chest. He listens even when he pretends not to. Always has.

“I need you to teach me,” I say.

Not how to fight. Not how to kill. How to stop breaking when the weight comes down.

He goes utterly still.

Not the calm kind. The kind that locks everything down before it detonates.

Then—slow, deliberate—his hand fists in the deer’s hide. Muscle cords up his forearm, tendons standing out sharp as wire. He squeezes.

Blood erupts between his knuckles, warm and sudden, splattering the dirt below. The hook overhead rattles, metal clanging like it can feel what’s coming.

“No.”

The word is final. A wall slammed down without negotiation.

My throat tightens, but I step closer anyway—into the heat of him, into the danger he’s trying to fence off. The air between us feels charged, prickling my skin.

“Then tell me what I’m supposed to do next time the world puts its hands on what’s mine. Because it’s already taken too much from me.”

“I said no, Selah.”

This time it’s a roar.

The coop erupts. Chickens scatter in a screaming burst of feathers and dust, wings beating frantically against wire and wood. The sound shudders through the yard, through my ribs His anger rolls out in a wave. Raw. Terrified. Protective in a way that feels almost violent.

The force of him hits hard enough to make my pulse jump, to make instinct scream step back, get clear, don’t provoke the storm.

But my feet stay planted.

My chest burns. My hands curl at my sides—not in fear, but in restraint. I can feel how badly he wants to push me away from this path, how much of that fury is him trying to absorb the blow meant for me.

It doesn’t send me running. Not anymore. Whatever comes next, I’m already standing in it.

“You learn this wrong and you don’t come back from it. You think because you got lucky with that hatchet,” he snarls, hauling the carcass closer, meat tearing wet against the hook, “and because Cass showed you a few tricks—you’re ready? You have any idea what you’re asking for?”

I do.

The knowing doesn’t arrive as a thought. It settles low and heavy, right behind my ribs. In my wrists. In the memory of resistance giving way beneath steel. In how my breath didn’t stutter when it mattered. I’ve felt the moment the world narrows to a single choice—and I didn’t look away.

It’s about what survives afterward.

I want whatever part of him learned how to stay standing when mercy failed. I want the softness stripped down to something that can’t be eaten alive. I want my bones to remember what my grief already knows.

I step into his fury instead of bracing against it.

“No,” I say, calm enough to make his anger falter. “I’m not ready.”